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This presentation discusses the use of a chatbot as a learning activity embedded in an aspirational careers program. While the use of chatbots in higher education and tutoring contexts is commonplace, the use of a chatbot as an active partner in learning to encourage student skill development and self-awareness is novel. We will describe the implementation of a chatbot—Monty—aimed at students who are 10 to 14 years-old. The resulting learning analytics reveal patterns around students’ abilities to communicate and develop empathy when limited exclusively to verbal communication strategies when solving a social problem by engaging with Monty. Implications for other uses of these types of tools are discussed Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The “Maker” movement is a cultural as well as educational phenomenon that has the potential to offer significant opportunities to students in conditions of social, economic and cultural disadvantage. The research reported in this paper, however, suggests that the simple provision of “Maker Spaces” for such activity is simplistic and not sufficient to realise this potential. The research involved a mixed methods study of a cohort of year 7 students (n = 26) in an Australian school located in a socio-economically disadvantaged outer-metropolitan region. The cohort undertook a range of Maker activities at a new “creativity centre” built at the school. Results indicate that the activities had positive impact on student attitudes towards science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) overall, but that the impact was highly specific across attitudinal constructs. A strong ranging effect was also evident, suggesting that the impact of the experience was highly dependent on students’ initial attitudes. Reflecting on these results, the paper also offers a reference framework that may help keep equity in mind when designing different kinds of Maker experience.

STEM has become a pervasive part of global education reform. The STEM discourse positions the purpose of scientific education as being to prepare young people for work in a hyper-competitive 21st century knowledge economy, pushing aside alternative approaches focussed on interrogating social, moral and political issues in context. This narrative does not always sit comfortably with the holistic ambitions of many state and faith-based education systems. In this paper we will argue that these tensions emerge from deeper conflicts in the cultural-discursive arrangements around education in the advanced democratic states through an exploration of the response to a STEM curriculum project in a Catholic education system. The exploration is based on a phenomenographic analysis of reflective interviews conducted with participating teachers. We conclude that while the teachers are aware of the tensions, they may benefit from access to a language for discussing the various pressures on learning design and meaning making. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Spatial reasoning has been shown to be an important, trainable cognitive skillset for developing successful engagement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), but little empirical work has been conducted in the context of digitally mediated pedagogies. This paper reports on a study into the effectiveness of a technologically enhanced STEM program on the spatial reasoning of a cohort of year 7 students (n = 107). The students undertook five digitally based activities over the period of a week and were assessed on their spatial reasoning development and attitudes towards STEM prior and subsequent to the intervention. Results indicate that the week of learning activities had an impact on attitudes towards STEM and had a positive impact on overall spatial skills. However, no statistically significant improvements were found within the spatial sub-skills or in relation to specific activities. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

There is a long-standing tension in mathematics and science curricula. In very broad terms, there is, on the one hand, the ‘traditional’ desire to develop the disciplinary knowledge and skills needed for higher education and scientific careers. In school science and mathematics education, though, the curriculum must also address the need to prepare young people with the scientific and mathematical understandings and dispositions needed to participate in society and an increasingly technical economy (Ball et al., 2017; Bøe et al., 2011). This tension is ever more apparent in version 9 of the Australian Curriculum, particularly through the explicit incorporation of the need to develop a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) workforce in the rationale for both the science and mathematics curriculum (ACARA, 2022). Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Originating from the learning sciences community, design-based research (DBR) is attracting interest from many educational researchers including those focused on mathematics. Beyond its research role, it is being seen as a collaborative way to engage teachers in deep professional development leading not only to changes in skill but also in purpose. Previous reviews of the approach, however, have offered only cautious optimism for the capacity of DBR to support widespread or scalable change. This paper will use methods drawn from the digital humanities and social sciences to explore patterns relating to regional differences, theoretical underpinnings, practical implementation and methodological choice in recent DBR research in the domain of mathematics education. The findings suggest that much of the work presented as DBR might be better characterized as ‘implementation studies’ as they contain only limited commitment to theoretical development capable of supporting the scaling of innovation. The exceptions appear to occur in settings with well-developed research capacity which recognizes the need for ontological innovation of theory whilst iteratively and comprehensively exploring the complexities of authentic learning interventions. An example of a rich mathematical research study using DBR is provided to point to the potential for this methodology to achieve its overarching aims more fully. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Design based research (DBR) has become a popular methodology for exploring various aspects of mathematics education due to its focus on theoretical development and practical implementation. Drawing on a recent meta-study into trends in mathematically focused DBR studies, this paper explores how this method is being used in comparison to its original goals.Findings indicate that most studies presenting as DBR are essentially isolated case studies exploring individual teaching interventions lacking the iterative development needed to meet the intentions of DBR. Reasons for the current state of research are suggested along with a potential research architecture for mathematics education. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Personal epistemological beliefs play a key role in teacher engagement with professional learning, so consideration of epistemic cognition is integral to the designing of sustainable professional learning. This qualitative study uses Chinn et al’s (2014) model of epistemic aims, epistemic ideals and reliable epistemic processes (the AIR model) as a theoretical scaffold from which to understand how teachers’ ontological and epistemic cognitions affect their engagement with a professional development focused on mathematics anxiety and metacognitive questioning. To cater for the complex situated nature of epistemic cognition, semi-structured interviews were conducted throughout the programme of teacher learning. Thematic analysis identified common influencers on teacher professional learning whilst highlighting conflicts between conceptions of the nature of mathematics and what they had been taught about mathematics teaching. Findings indicate that teachers engaged most fully with situated, practical learning experiences in collaborative learning spaces as they allowed for greater alignment between professional learning content and personal epistemic beliefs. Recommendations for future professional learning and adaptations to the study’s epistemic research methodology are provided in the light of the findings. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The recent expansion of the science of learning has extended the understanding of how learning occurs. Progress on translating that research into educational practice, however, has been slow. Indeed there is strong evidence that established educational environments are highly resilient, and that research and design partnerships have a poor history of achieving scalable and sustainable change in fundamental practices.This chapter reports on the pilot phase of a program seeking to achieve lasting change in mathematics education through co-design. The pilot took place in a regional South Australian community where mathematics success has been challenging. It sought to improve ‘school-maths’, but to also improve students’ ability to adapt their mathematics to unrehearsed situations. To do this, the program established a co-design process around simple design principles drawn from the science of learning research in which program officers – teachers seconded for the purpose - worked with teachers from the program schools over a multi-year timeframe. The foremost of these principles was that children’s thinking and particularly their ‘executive functioning’ was to be at the centre of mathematics learning. The co-design process was guided by a central goal of achieving a ‘fidelity of principle’ that allowed for variations in implementation. At the time of writing, the program has been extended and expanded to other sites. This is a positive sign for the capacity of co-design to achieve scalable and ongoing change. The pilot demonstrates that co-design takes time, benefits from boundary-crossing structures, and needs to engage the complexities of teacher practice.

The Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize is organised by the Museum of South Australia each year, with the winning works typically touring to other states. Named after the founder of the museum, it features art inspired by science. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This project set out with the intent of exploring the potential of an innovative research method for use in the evaluation of university outreach programs in the science, technology,engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. The disruptions caused by the COVID-19pandemic and the suspension of the targeted programs early in the project changed the target application somewhat, but not the overall purpose of the project. Applied instead to an in-house STEM program at a partner school and the move to online learning due to the suspension of face-to-face teaching due to the pandemic, the central research question for the project remained: “Can novel research methods provide access to useful and usable evaluative data on student attitudes towards their school subjects particularly in response to changes in their learning program?”

Emerging digital technologies offer a transformative potential to redefine learning tasks and many examples of this potential are now available. The scaling of the innovative pedagogies emerging from the research into widespread and sustainable practice, however, remains problematic. This paper addresses the issue of scaling by using Design Based Research (DBR), also known as Educational Design Research, within teacher professional development to reposition teachers’ thinking about the place of digital tools in their teaching. Using a project seeking to support the use of new digital technologies to develop children’s spatial reasoning as a ‘worked example’, this paper highlights how the bringing together of the knowledge of educational research and knowledge of teaching practice in DBR can provide a catalyst for epistemic change. The paper will argue that DBR positions the knowledge and practice objects of both research and teaching as ‘epistemic’ or ‘not yet known’ objects and, therefore, the legitimate focus of experimentation and reflection. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This report provides a synopsis of data collected from the ongoing Foldback Project. This project seeks to support innovation in schooling by providing the multi-level, multi-scale data required to understand change in complex educational settings (Sawyer, 2014). This is a significant, multi-disciplinary endeavour that is allowing us to understand the impact of changes to learning design across a range of educational outcomes such as attitude, self-regulation, and creativity. It is also allowing us to explore what students and teachers believe about learning, and what is being learned. The data and analysis presented in this report represent a point in time of one of the schools partnering in the project.

Secondary education around the world has been significantly disrupted by covid-19. Students have been forced into new ways of independent learning, often using remote technologies, but without the social nuances and direct teacher interactions of a normal classroom environment. Using data from the School Attitudes Survey—which surveys students regarding the perceived level of difficulty, anxiety level, self-efficacy, enjoyability, subject relevance, and opportunities for creativity with regards to each of their school subjects—this study examines students' responses to this disruption from two very different schools with two very different experiences of the pandemic. This paper reports on the composite attitudinal profiles of students in the senior secondary levels at each school (Years 10–12, n = 834). The findings challenged our expectation that the increased difficulty and anxiety caused by the disruption would reduce perceived opportunities for creativity. Indeed, our analyses showed that the students at both schools demonstrated generally positive attitudes toward their learning and strongly associated opportunities for creativity with other attitudinal constructs including enjoyability, subject relevance, and self-efficacy. These complex associations made by the students appear to have buffered the impacts of the disruption, and they may even have supported creative resilience.

This paper will use methods drawn from the digital humanities and social sciences to undertake a meta-study of recent EDR research in the domain of mathematics education. The findings suggest that much of the work presented as EDR might be better characterised as implementation studies as they contain only limited commitment to theoretical development capable of supporting the scaling of innovation.

Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Fraction knowledge is deeply complex, and its many facets are rarely completely appreciated. With this in mind, we designed an assessment intended to elucidate fraction knowledge amongst Year 6 and 7 students. The test itself revealed important aspects of student learning, but later discussion of the test with the students provided a much greater opportunity for teacher learning. This paper reports on the value of collaborative assessment design as a form of teacher professional learning. It will also discuss the value of using both symbol and language in developing mathematical behaviours and understandings. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The learning spaces of higher education are changing with collaborative, agile and technology-enabled spaces ever more popular. Despite the massive investment required to create these new spaces, current quality systems are poorly placed to account for the value they create. Such learning spaces are typically popular with students but the impact they have on learning outcomes is difficult to capture. Taking a design-research approach, this paper presents a way of assessing the value of learning spaces in context through systematically mapping the expectations reified in their designs. While presenting a series of specific tools that support this mapping exercise, this paper also contributes to a larger conversation about the sorts of tools and processes the academic community might use in accounting for the quality of its work. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The scholarship of education demands a special kind of criticality. In our educational space critique is insufficient. In responding to transformations in our society it is incumbent upon us to build social capacity for action in the midst of uncertainty. This paper tells a story of an engagement in critical design that began when we were asked by the government of the state of South Australia to develop a program that would improve the capacity of new teachers to teach STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) 'authentically' and linked to 'real world industrial contexts'. As advocates of authentic learning this task was essentially a good fit. The government's insistence on the common policy dis-course of industry need for so called 'STEM skills', however, was at odds with workforce research (see for example Smith, White, 2019) and this created a lingering doubt. Why are we being resourced to develop programs to address problems that do not seem to exist? Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This plan and evidence base have been developed at the request of Questacon, the National Science and Technology Centre. It is intended as the framing document to begin the design of a new program in mathematics education to be conducted by Questacon in partnership with universities.

The technology supporting augmented and mixed reality educational environments is advancing with recent hardware including self-contained headsets that are able to simulate holographic additions to real spaces. These technical advances appear to offer greater capacity to actually realise the educational potential and promise of such technologies noted in the literature over the last decade. This article adds to this literature by reporting on the pilot phase of an educational design research project using the Microsoft HoloLens device in a secondary school setting in Australia. Consistent with previous research in this area, this project found ongoing technical and managerial limitations in implementing augmented and mixed reality, including a continuing concern by many participating teachers of a lack of control of the mixed reality environment. Notably, the pilot study also revealed different understandings of the potential for embodied learning between students, teachers and researchers that requires further research. Published: 27 November 2018 This paper is part of the special collection Mobile Mixed Reality Enhanced Learning, edited by Thom Cochrane, Fiona Smart, Helen Farley and Vickel Narayan. More papers from this collection can be found here Citation: Research in Learning Technology 2018, 26 : 2160 - http://dx.doi.org/10.25304/rlt.v26.2160

Underpinned by the nation-wide Early Learning STEM Australia (ELSA) project, this practice illustration presents a design framework to respond to the challenges of scaling and sustaining a large design-based research project. The framework, known as STEM Practices Framework, is informed by work within the Learning Sciences which suggests that the interplay between project innovation and the wider educational reform priorities are critical to the sustainability and scalability of projects. The ELSA project responded to this by developing processes of developmental evaluation to parallel the design based research of the project. Emerging from that process was a design proposition that the object of the project, and the entire STEM education agenda, is not simply to improve educational practice, but to shift educational purpose. Specifically, the paper argues that STEM Practices represents a qualitative shift in purpose from the content bound traditions of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education towards developing a greater capacity to use practices in diverse STEM contexts. The STEM Practices Framework described here was developed to support educators and developers to implement the project innovations built on this understanding. The framework is in two parts: (1) an adaptation of Kemmis et al.’s (2014) practice architectures approach and the practice architectures that support and constrain those practices. (2) A heuristic for working with STEM practices in large scale implementation., EDeR. Educational Design Research, Vol 2 No 1 (2018)

The purpose of this paper is to propose new directions for research in the use of video analysis to improve teaching and learning design in mathematics. The research directions have been developed through an international collaboration involving researchers from Italy and Australia.The paper includes an outline of these context and the different drivers for research before presenting providing a literature review to support future methodological innovation. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Designers are increasingly in demand in a range of context because of their ability to deal with complexity and develop innovative solutions. Educational practice, however, is not yet on par with the multi-disciplinary and multimodal learning style of today’s students. Gamification offers the promise of an innovative approach to engage students and produce better learning outcomes. The challenges facing gamification designers are parallel to those of experience designers, chiefly in ensuring the solution is contextually and personal relevant to the user. Learning design thinking, however, is a complex social activity influenced by myriad contextual factors. Cultural historical activity theory, when coupled with design-based research, offers a theoretical foundation that allows for gamification to be used for expansive education. The authors present The Four Orders of Gamification and a Gamification Design System that enables design educators to develop expansive curricula for tomorrow’s designers. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

An important issue for the Educational Design Research (EDeR) community to continue to deal with is the scalable and sustainable implementation of its methods, findings and designs beyond the bounds of specific projects. Those engaged in EDeR specifically seek out concurrent problems of theory and problems of practice, but this should not be seen as sufficient for ensuring their work has impact beyond their current project. Just as with other forms of research, EDeR practitioners must still reach out to and connect with educational institutions and teachers who are dealing with many competing demands. This position paper offers a largely theoretical contribution to the discussion of the problem of implementation. It will introduce the concept of conceptual tinkering as an approach to engaging teachers in the skillsets and, more importantly, the mindsets of EDeR as an approach to educational improvement. Sketches and prototypes of tools to enable conceptual tinkering will be discussed. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This document outlines the design, schedule and findings for the evaluation of a trial using HoloLens technology as a teaching tool at Canberra Grammar School, Australia. The trial was initiated in October 2016 with a series of teacher design sessions, followed by an application (app) development stage led by Pearson TQ Education and Training (referred to as Pearson throughout this report). The main trial of the prototype apps took place during the period May to June 2017. During the trial, data was collected from students, teachers and the school executive using a range of methods including surveys, interviews, and focus groups. This evaluation report has been prepared for Pearson, and the data generated will also be used to inform subsequent academic research on the use of HoloLens technology and mixed reality as teaching and learning tools in other secondary school contexts. Overall, this was a limited but encouraging and successful trial. The teacher and student responses are very positive with the finding that students responded in complex ways to the experience.

In this study, we seek to illuminate the effects of the global policy convergence in education through a close study of its enactment within an Australian Teacher Education course. Building on an examination of the changing priorities of a cohort of pre-service teachers over a short space of time, we argue that the enactment of New Public Management approaches to the governance of teaching in Australia is having adverse effects on the professional learning of new teachers, defeating the policy goals. Previous studies have investigated the affective impact of current global policy formations on teachers. Building on that work, this study considers the impacts that the teacher policy emphasis on performance' has had on professional learning processes, which are understood with reference to Kolb's Experiential Learning Theory. The study is undertaken using an interpretative phenomenographic approach and informed by the related methods of discursive psychology, which positions discourse as a discursive practice to achieve specific goals in specific contexts. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper argues for the use of 'developmental' evaluation as a design-based research tool for sustainable curriculum innovation in professional higher education. Professional education is multi-faceted and complex with diverse views from researchers, professional practitioners, employers and the world of politics leaving little consensus about the nature of educational 'problems', let alone educational 'solutions'. Developmental evaluation is an emerging approach to evaluating innovations and/or organisations that are in a continuous state of change; it asks the evaluators to not simply appraise a final design, but to work with designers through processes of rapid reconnaissance, mapping the territory and emergent modelling. This paper provides an account of how the adoption of the dispositions and approaches of developmental evaluation increased the trustworthiness of decision-making in the design of a new post-graduate teacher education degree in Australia. The principles of developmental evaluation as a design thinking approach have application in other complex curriculum settings. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Emerging technologies offer an opportunity for the development, at the institutional level, of quality processes with greater capacity to enhance learning in higher education than available through current quality processes. These systems offer the potential to extend use of learning analytics in institutional-level quality processes in addition to the widespread focus on business analytics, and to deliver well-constructed mixes of information from different data sources. Borrowed from music amplification, the term fold-back is proposed as a way to describe such a mix. This paper begins the design-research project of designing effective fold-back systems by expanding the theoretical assumptions about learning embedded in higher education quality processes. A number of theories building on Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach are discussed to imagine quality in higher education in terms of what students actually do and how they engage in addition to what the institution does. The discussion is summarised in a fold-back matrix capturing the sorts of evaluation questions the systems might address. The paper concludes by providing two initial design sketches for re-purposing emerging technologies with the capacity to support expanded quality processes in education. These sketches are based on the Experience Application Programming Interface (xAPI) and Dedoose technologies.

This paper argues that the emergence of design thinking and design-research provide a renewed opportunity for expansive learning, and proposes a model for educational design using concepts drawn from Activity Theory, Ecological Cognition, and other systems-based understandings of learning. The model is argued in the context of a design project involving the ‘gamification’ of workplace learning. The use of games and game mechanics has become a popular approach to workplace learning due to the apparent capacity of the approach to increase collaborative problem solving and ‘user’ buy-in. This paper, however, discusses a workplace learning game that, in prototype, has lead to significant transformation or workplace practice, particularly in relation to information and knowledge sharing within the company. Through a design-research process, we use the proposed model to examine the game and identify its successful features. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the model can inform understandings of the value created through learning in workplaces and other settings. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper provides a critique of the performative assumptions of the teacher professional learning policy direction being adopted in Australia. Through international policy borrowing, the policy direction in Australia is similar to many other countries in that it encourages increasingly standardised teaching practice to afford a more quantitative approach to evaluation. The intent through this paper is to encourage greater imagination with regards to what counts as useful in teacher professional learning. This is achieved initially through highlighting the evidence of teacher learning within the Australian Sustainable Schools Initiative (AuSSI), a programme that makes use of collaborative professional inquiry around authentic problems. The social theory concepts of cross-field effects and linked ecologies are then deployed in an analysis of the emerging national policy framework for teacher professional learning in Australia, arguing that this policy framework can suppress the types of learning occurring in approaches such as the AuSSI. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This study offers a theoretical construct for better understanding how experiential learning enables student teachers to acquire social and cultural variation skills, develop cultural empathy in the K-12 classroom, and the transference of these skills to new educational situations. An Australian and United States research team used a phenomenological approach to explore the connections between the skills student teachers acquire and the application of these newly developed skills to professional practices. Participants were a group of United States pre-teachers who enrolled in a 5 week teaching experience in Australia. Findings show that participation in cultural based events is part of a complex decision making process. The variety of cultures that now exist in schools requires new teachers to obtain and apply a skillset that promotes manoeuvrability through, and an understanding of the many definitions of culture. A better understanding of this process may strengthen curricula and improvements in teacher education program delivery and further enhance higher education study-abroad international partnerships. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In this article we investigate the generative causes of variation in the professional identity of new teachers. Building on previous work that has shown a link between professional identity and socio-political context, we argue that the context experienced in late adolescence and early adulthood is particularly significant in shaping how beginning teachers think of themselves as teachers. This finding suggests that the linear response to neoliberal education reform described in much of the critical literature may be too simple to account for the range of ways teachers interact with the system. There is, therefore, a need for greater diversity in research approaches to work with the complexity of social systems in and around schools. To support this call for methodological diversity, we borrow the life story model of identity as a theoretical framework and use a computer-assisted phenomenographic analysis technique to find new ways into the research data. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In this paper the written feedback provided by mentor teachers using a new assessment model for preservice teacher professional experience deployed in the Australian Capital Territory and based on the Australian National Standards for Teachers is analysed. The analysis reveals mentor teachers hold a pervasive theory-in-use in regards to the needs of beginning teachers that may restrict the developmental ambition of the assessment model. The restricted vision of what is important for beginning teachers held by mentor teachers is possibly a reaction to continual change within school education. The analysis is preceded by a description of the 'Professional Conversations' model for mentoring preservice and early career teachers. Refereed/Peer-reviewed